One Vibrator Per Teen

One Vibrator Per Teen: Changing A Teenager’s Life, One Sex Toy at a Time.

To get sex toys when I was a teenager, I had to break the law. Like all teenagers, I was obsessed with sex. Unlike all teenagers, I was obsessed with sex toys and would tromp into sex-toy stores just to gaze at the bizarre dildo packaging. This being the late 1990s, shopping online wasn’t an option. So I went to brick-and-mortar stores for my dildo fix. The only problem was that I was 16, and the minimum age was 18. So every time I went into the Adult Fun Shop, I was afraid that I’d get kicked out. Even its name reminded me that I wasn’t welcome. That added to the thrill, of course, but it also made me think that exploring my sexual desires was illegal, which leads me to my proposal (actually it was my boyfriend’s idea) that all adolescent girls should be eligible to receive a free vibrator when they turn 13. 

Here’s how the One Vibrator Per Teen program would work:

When a girl turns 13, she would be eligible to sign up for the One Vibrator Per Teen program via a website, which would feature information on masturbation, sexual health, contraception, and all the other things you need to know when you develop breasts and pubic hair. A week later, a phthalate-free rechargeable silicone vibrator clothed in discreet packaging would arrive at her home, packaged with water-based lubricant and an informational booklet.

Not only would teenage girls benefit from this program, but sex-toy companies would also profit from the early brand recognition. Gaining brand loyalty by giving away swag to hormonal girls is a time-worn strategy. For decades the feminine-hygiene company Kimberly-Clark has offered free sex-education materials to teachers in an attempt to get their maxi pads in the hands of as many new menstruators as possible, so why shouldn’t Trojan also get in the game? 

Do Sex Toys Infantilize Women?

Is this a sex toy or a children’s toy?

Sex toy. The very name implies a childish device, something that doesn’t take sexuality seriously. While in theory this is fine, in practice the toy-ness of the devices sometimes ends up flowing through the design in a way that implies that female sexuality is infantile and frivolous.

It’s not that I want all sex toys to be realistic looking. In fact, one of the appealing things about sex toys is that they represent the cleaning up of the genitals. They’re not marred tangly pubic hair, pendulous droopy testicles, or uneven textures. But it’s worth examining why we have so many cloyingly designed genital stimulators. There is something decidedly un-erotic about many of the female sex toys on the market. It’s as if sex toy companies were focus-group testing  themes on elementary school-aged girls. Why else would we have sex toys in the shape of seahorses, kitty cats, butterflies, roses, and cupcakes?

Take the Big Teaze Toys’ I Rub My Duckie, which is, as its name implies, a rubber duck-shaped vibrator (pictured above in the Furry Hoodie Kitty version). More akin to a Polly Pocket doll than to a dildo, the I Rub My Duckie comes in a variety of personalities, including Bondage Fashionista, Sweetheart, and Pirate. Most of these come with matching removable accessories, including a feather boa for the Paris and Sweetheart ducks and a fuzzy hat for the Furry Hoodie Kitty, unfortunate accessories for devices that routinely get slathered in female sexual juices. (In all fairness, the boas and hats are removable.) With its Swarovski crystals and hard plastic exterior, the design of the I Rub My Duckie has very little to do with sexual pleasure, and everything to do with play. It’s all toy and no sex.

The History of Sex Toy Humor

Sketch of “The Delighter.” (Circa 1920s) From the National Museum of American History Archives Center Business Americana Collection

For as long as sex toys have been around, we’ve been laughing at them. But why we think they’re funny is difficult to explain. If you asked a group of people to explain why they laugh at dildos, you’d be met with blank stares. (Or you’d be forcibly removed from your family reunion. Don’t ask).

In an attempt to understand the mechanics behind sex-toy humor, I recently read Gershon Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke. In the book, Legman argues that one of the functions of humor is that it allows us to discuss taboo subjects in polite society. We can joke about sex in venues where we can’t talk seriously about it because the humor “absorbs and controls… by means of laughter, the great anxiety that both teller and listener feel in connection with certain culturally determined themes.” Following this logic, we joke about sex toys because it’s the only way that our society allows us to discuss them without facing societal repercussions.

One of the earliest records of dildo humor  is from the Greek poet Herodas, who was writing in the 3rd Century BC.  In a bawdy sketch titled Mime , a woman (Metro) is asking her friend (Koritto) where she bought her dildo. Koritto responds to Metro’s question with a rhapsodic description of her sex toys: When I saw them, my eyes swam at the sight—men don’t have such firm pricks! Not only that, but its smoothness is sleep, and its straps are like wool, not leather. As is typical of much dildo comedy throughout history, the humor is related to men’s fears of penile inadequacy, a fear that given a choice, women would prefer the smooth, perpetually hard dildo to the flawed and fallible penises of their partners.

Let’s Give Female Masturbation a New Name

Jack off. Choke the chicken. Beat the meat. Spank the monkey. The rich vocabulary to describe male masturbation is directly related to our acceptance and even celebration of it. Women’s masturbation is less accepted, so the terminology used to describe it suffers as a result. If you asked a random person on the street to name euphemisms for female masturbation, they’d probably fail to name even one. I’ve read that Jill off is a female-specific term, but I’ve never actually heard anybody use it.  Since I spend a large portion of my life writing and speaking about female masturbation, I am routinely frustrated by the dearth of terms to describe it. (As you’ll note from this paragraph, I’ve always resorted to using the cumbersome phrase female masturbation).

Before we investigate alternative terms for female masturbation, it’s instructive to delve into masturbate itself. Masturbate most likely derives from the Latin manus (hand) and stupare (to defile), according to the OED. Its origins reveal that it once was a pejorative term, as many terms for masturbation are today. Etymology aside, masturbate is simply too cumbersome and unwieldy to form the basis of the go-to term for female self-pleasuring. Masturbate doesn’t so much as roll off the tongue as it does tumble in a cascade of inelegant syllables.

Not surprisingly, the Ancient Greeks had a few terms for female masturbation, one of which was clitorize, according to Rod L. Evans’ Sex-i-con.  Evans says that clitorize derives from the Greek kleitoris, whose etymology is uncertain but the OED says that it may derive from a Greek word meaning to shut. First-century Greek physician Rufus of Ephesus defined clitorize as “the lascivious touching” of the clitoris. In Latin there was maritate, meaning “to manipulate one’s vulva by hand; of females, to masturbate.”  It was derived from “maritus (husband), with the suggestion that one’s hand is acting as a husband,” according to Evans. Although I love the idea of having a hand husband, but I can’t imagine myself employing the word maritate in my daily life.

Why Technological Innovation Always Leads to Masturbation

Young’s Rectal Dilators from the late 1800s. These rubber butt plugs were made possible through the vulcanization of rubber.

One of the questions that my dissertation aims to answer is why technological innovations are nearly always followed by sexual innovations. The discovery of the rubber vulcanization process in the mid-1800s led to the production of dildos. Electrification in the late 1800s was quickly followed by the invention of the electromechanical vibrator.  The invention of Bakelite plastic led to innovative vibrator casings.

If technology is an extension of human faculties, as Marshall McLuhan argued, if it is driven not by an autonomous force but by very human desires for love and sex, community and connection, then it would make sense that new innovations in materials are followed by new sexual products. What drew me to the topic of sex toys in the first place was a naive hope, shared by inventors, that someday the inexplicable mysteries of the universe could be solved through human ingenuity, that sexual intercourse and masturbation, two of the most enjoyable activities that a human being can engage in, could be improved if only we spent some time designing the perfect sex machine.  And it is this same sort of optimism that I’ve seen in early 1930s brochures for Bakelite plastic, touted as the material of a thousand uses, one of which was to enclose our vibrators in beautiful, yet durable cases. There is a downside to this optimism; it burdens our technologies with expectations that they can never live up to. But what interests me is not the fact that our expectations always fail, but that our expectations never change.

When a new technology is developed, we always think that it will elevate us above our animal nature, yet we end up burrowing deeper into its recesses.  Inventors claim that their new technologies will create world peace. Yet, in reality, something very predictable happens. Instead of using technology to better humanity, we use it to improve our sex lives. For example, the internet was supposed to revolutionize education, but instead it improved masturbation. Few celebrate this. But the glut of pornography on the internet should not be ignored. It shouldn’t necessarily be championed either. It’s not a black-and-white issue. As Richard Randall argues, the pornographic imagination has always and will always exist. The human erotic imagination is messy and beautiful, revolting and sublime, but we shouldn’t be ashamed of it. It should be treated as a uniquely human trait and not dismissed as an aberration. It is our job to understand it, to study it, and to acknowledge it as one of the defining features of our existence.

This Vibrator Wants to Replace Your Boyfriend

Introducing Your Vagina’s New Best Friend: The LadyHug Vibrator
Image from AHAlife.com

Women’s sex toys are capable of terrifying the most secure man in the world. They’re  candy-colored, hairless devices that vibrate and pulsate with an intensity that no man can achieve with any part of his body. The human penis looks wildly unimaginative in comparison. Sex toys are proof  that intelligent design does not exist. If we really had an intelligent designer, men’s penises would wiggle in five million directions, their testicles would vibrate, and they’d ejaculate White Mystery Airheads candy. And, yes, with that sentence I’ve just put an end to all theological debate. You’re welcome.

So along comes men’s biggest nightmare: the LadyHug, the empathetic vibrator that not only improves upon the penis but also gives the vagina emotional fulfillment. Fortunately for men, the LadyHug can’t quite pull off this persona. It’s marketed as a sex toy that “hugs” and “embraces,” but never “fucks.” A bright red palm-sized device that looks like a bargain-basement robot’s flying vagina, the LadyHug has tiny “paddled arms” that are designed to grasp the labia and clitoris and multiple downloadable vibration patterns so that a woman’s vagina never gets bored.The LadyHug “snuggles up as close as it can get while it vibrates.” And it’s also designed to bolster your self-esteem. “LadyHug is as intuitive and ever-changing as the female it satisfies,” the company proudly declares. Meanwhile, the vibrator itself looks like an alien weapon from Battleship. I can imagine it developing “intuition” and tearing off the clitorises of all human females in an attempt to build the universe’s most powerful pleasure device.

The problem with the LadyHug’s marketing campaign is that it miscalculates in its use of female stereotypes. I don’t want my vibrators to compassionately copulate with me. If I wanted to be made love to, I’d become a feminist juggler in a Marxist clown troop, since they’re the only demographic who makes love anymore. Women don’t want to be friends with their vibrators. They don’t want their vibrators to compliment them or tell them that they look skinny in their new outfit. They don’t want their vibrators to be gentle or cuddly. They want them to be sexy and edgy and give them the best orgasms of their lives. The LadyHug assumes that every woman’s clitoris is a timid organ that needs to be gently coaxed into orgasm. But the clitoris doesn’t need platitudes. It needs to be dominated. And the poorly named LadyHug isn’t up to the task.

Why Women Should Give Porn a Chance

A pornography protest organized by the North Carolina-based Praise Assembly Worship Center.

I’m tired of women becoming insecure after they stumble upon their boyfriends jacking off to Japanese teen bukkake porn. What men masturbate to is not a reflection on their girlfriends’ looks or sexual abilities in bed.

So why does porn upset women so much? (Full Disclosure: I know that not all women feel this way. I’m a woman who watches porn, and I have a lot of female friends who love it too). I’m not even referring to the  hard-core feminists here; I’m talking about the young professionals and stay-at-home moms who are threatened by their husband’s stash of vintage transgender magazines. How can a woman who professes to be enlightened chafe at her partner’s interest in pornography?

Men don’t get threatened by romantic movies, which present ridiculously unrealistic images of what a heterosexual love relationship should be like. Romantic movies never show farting in bed, pooping on the couch, or other things that happen all the time in committed relationships when one or both of the partners has norovirus. They aren’t angered by romance novels or 50 Shades of Grey. I believe that men are less threatened because most of women’s sexual fantasies live in the imagination or on the page; they are not acted out by beautiful acrobatic porn stars.  Of course, romantic movies do realize some of women’s fantasies, but they show the conventional fantasy of a committed relationship based upon undying love, which most people don’t consider grotesque. Even 50 Shades of Grey places a sadomasochistic relationship in the comforting confines of monogamy. In any case, women’s insane wedding fantasies are more disturbing to me than a triple-penetration rodeo-clown porn. So why can’t women learn from men and leave their boyfriends’ fantasies alone?

Sex Toy Review: The Trojan Vibrating Tri-phoria

The Trojan Vibrating Triphoria, un-boxed and mysteriously standing upright. Mine couldn’t do this. (Image from trojanvibrations.com).

After months of debate, I finally decided to purchase the Trojan Vibrating Tri-phoria at Walgreens early this morning. I came to this decision after I determined that no self-respecting dildographer could carry on her profession without trying out one of the most widely marketed vibrators in the United States. Trojan is one of the few companies that advertises their vibrators on TV, so chances are if you ask the average American to name a vibrator, the Tri-phoria or the Twister is what comes to mind. I think of Trojan vibrators as either introductory vibrators for those who are too scared to enter a sex-toy store or impulse purchases for women who stumble upon them in their drugstore aisles while searching for Kotex’s new multicolored tampons . Trojan’s brand recognition allows their sex-toys to serve as gateway vibrators. If you’ve already entrusted Trojan condoms to protect you from AIDS, buying one of their vibrators just makes sense.

I surprised myself in being mildly embarrassed while purchasing this at Walgreens. Maybe it’s because I’m a regular at this Walgreens. Yes, you can be a regular nighttime shopper at a local chain drug store, and I’m proud that I’m a member of this exclusive club. Anyway,because it comes in a beautiful glossy purple package whose cover lacks any images, it’s not too embarrassing to buy.

The package that almost killed me.

Unfortunately, upon coming home and  tearing upon the box, I discovered that the vibrator was ensconced in one of those miserable hard plastic tombs that require rarefied skill to open. I had a Larry David moment where I screamed and poked at it with a pair of old, dirty scissors. When that didn’t work, I switched to a dull steak knife, which punctured the resilient plastic, but resulted in a small cut on my pinky.

Why can’t we just call a Dildo a “Dildo”?

As I pore over the vice reports of our mutton-chopped 19^th century postal censor, Anthony Comstock, I’m continuously surprised that he refused to refer to the dildo as a dildo. “Too gross to be described,” he says in a published vice report from 1882 in reference to “immoral rubber goods,” a sweeping category that included condoms, dildos, French ticklers, and odd things like fake dog poop. He didn’t feel comfortable describing them in detail, but he took pleasure in quantifying the amount of sex products that he confiscated. In 1882 alone it was 64,836 pounds.

It’s as if Comstock believed that the word itself was so dangerous that printing it could have a deleterious effect on all who read it. Sometimes in the confidential arrest reports he has scribbled the word. When he arrested sex goods proprietor Louis Beer, he noted: “The man who brought the dildoe to America.” Of course he was giving Beer too much credit because most likely the man who brought the dildo to America has been dead for 3,000 years. What would be more correct is to call him the man who brought the rubber dildo to America, but my research shows that it definitely wasn’t Beer. The father of American gynaecology, J. Marion Sims, did more to popularize the dildo than anyone else I know. In the mid-1800s, he advocated the use of dilators (now referred to as “medical dildos”) as treatments for vaginismus, a condition where the vagina spasms and tightens so much prior to sexual intercourse that a penis is unable to penetrate the wall of rigid genital tissue.

For some reason the task of avoiding the use of words like dildo, condom, and French tickler caused government officials to wax poetic about rubber sexual devices.  In an 1873 speech to the House of Representatives, New York congressman Clinton L. Merriam, stumping for an obscenity bill, had this to say:

“It is terrible to contemplate that more than six thousand persons are daily employed in a carefully organized business, stimulated to activity by all the incentives that avarice and wickedness can invent, to place in the schools, and homes of our country, books, pictures and immoral appliances, of so low and debasing a nature that it would seem as if the brute creation itself would turn from them in disgust”

By avoiding using the word dildo, America’s censors ended up imbuing it with a mystical power, making dildo the word whose name they dared not speak, and whose etymology is a mystery. But the word may be making a comeback. This month postal censors made Vice magazine cover up their picture of a dildo with a DILDO sticker. Progress? Not really. We won’t be truly progressive until neither the word or the device offends.

Is This What Men Want?

The Newest in Masturbation Technology

When you’re the type of company that churns out male masturbation devices that look like decapitated heads, it’s kind of difficult to top yourself. So, what is Pipedream Products to do?  Create the Mega Fuck Slut Mega Masturbator; that’s what. Weighing twenty-five pounds and constructed with thermo-plastic rubber, The Mega Fuck Slut is a limbless torso with both anal and vaginal orifices, which appears to be more at home in a Saw movie than on your kitchen counter (or wherever one keeps such things). According to Pipedream Products, this sex toy came about through customer demand. Customers wanted both a “front and a back side of a torso” to copulate with.  I’m not sure if they requested that it lack appendages, but I’m assuming that they did because a plethora of fully limbed blow-up dolls already exist. Why would a man want to copulate with a limbless large-breasted plastic woman? If I knew the answer to that, I’d have won a MacArthur Genius Grant by now. It seems like this sex toy would only appeal to heterosexual male serial killers, but I doubt that there are enough around to make this masturbator a profitable enterprise. If these were cheaper, I’d suggest sending one to Rush Limbaugh so that he could learn the true meaning of slut,  but at $1,567.50, it’s not worth it.

Even though the Mega Fuck Slut may be abhorrent to 99% of the population, its promotional video can teach us important lessons about what not to do when marketing a giant sex toy. Here are the three biggest marketing mistakes in the Mega Fuck Slut Mega Masturbator video:

1. Inexplicable Censorship of Packaging On the packaging  of the box, the real breasts of  the human model are censored with a fluorescent green bar, yet the plastic breasts, vagina, and anus of the artificial woman are considered acceptable enough to be fully displayed, as is the obscene name of the product.

2. Failure to Demonstrate a Product’s Attributes The demonstrator gets out a measuring tape to measure the mega masturbator’s length and width but doesn’t show anybody the actual measurements.

3. Making Dubious Assumptions About the Target Market He presumes that every man has an “enema hose” in his shower.

When will companies learn that a 27-inch long fuckable headless torso with anal and vaginal openings doesn’t just sell itself?

http://www.pipedreamproducts.com/jwplayer/player.swf